These “stereotypes” are based on actual demographic data of people getting married later in life, unemployment levels, underemployment levels, debt levels and other real metrics. And those numbers tell us a lot of those people exist. At least more than they did before.
It has nothing to do with “being a weirdo with mommy issues”. It has more to do with economic factors that are delaying young people who actually want to start their lives from actually doing so.
Why just the cultural elite? Its the entire plutocratic element of this country-be it the Wall Street investors getting companies they have shareholds in to “downsize” by eliminating or outsourcing thousands of jobs or the Hollywood comedian making jokes about how subhuman the inbred rednecks are.
Yeah, like Wall Street and the bizcons and the 1% and the Pub establishment and blue-collar-pandering Trump view them any other way. The one candidate this cycle you can be sure doesn’t view the working class with disdain and contempt is Sanders, that lib-progressive elitist.
How does any of that point to a rise in “prolonged adolescence”? Especially getting married later in life. That’s a choice, not a sign of a desire to stay forever 13.
Maybe msmith’s point is that people who want to get married and want “adult responsibilities” but are unable to achieve these things perceive themselves to be in a “prolonged adolescence”. There is still a big stigma to living with one’s parents after a certain age, and there has never been a time when being unemployed or underemployed was “cool”. Not in the USA, at least.
But I’m doubtful that the increase in suicide is being driven by the economic angst of Millennials. Middle age is 35 to 65.
BrainGlutton, that article is interesting and resonates with what I said before. We define success based on the status of our parents/family. If we can match or exceed that bar, we feel good about ourselves. If we don’t, we feel like a loser.
A theory I’ve heard and agreed with is that it has to do with family life. Lower marriage rates, more offloading of granny to homes, less children, less reason for sticking around.
One of the reasons I think Hispanics stick around longer is that they probably have more extended families where abuelita moves into the house of the parents of a family, helps with raising and baby sitting and generally is given more of a “purpose” for existing than some decaying life in a home where the baby boomer generation dumps off their parents, or they are starting to get dumped off.
Living without community and alone hurts, and I do worry that not having the same defacto religious community as a secular person, and a gay guy at that who’s not in a relationship will affect my longevity. But I still have some time to fix the latter, but the clock is ticking, 33 now and in the gay world it’s kind of a logans run scenario where people have expiration dates to a lot of prospects.
The thing I wonder is, does anyone outside of their class really care much about their fate, whether they live or die etc.
I remember in school the stark divide between the middle /upper middle class kids and the lower track kids. The former group thought of the latter group as almost beneath contempt for the most part. Not much of that has really changed as people have gotten older either.
There really is no family sense in today’s white America. It seems everyone expects their own little piece of the world. There isn’t that sense of community and extended family where a person’s presence is valued as much as their economic contributions.
White America means working, working, working, fart out kids, get divorced, kids grow and leave, you keep working. Then what, retire alone? Retire with a mate? But chances are you won’t have funds to do anything in retirement except eke out a very basic existence.
Whatever happened to the extended family? Whatever happened to retiring and staying with that family to help with the kids and the household? For some weird reason, it is considered a bad thing if the old generation goes to live with the young.
The points made in this thread - mainly that middle-aged White males are more likely to have experienced the economic downturn with more psychological despair than many other groups for various reasons (more perceived loss of status; loss of past previous optimism that things will get better for them; increased fragmentation of extended family and other social support systems; etc.) - have all been very well made. I think that middle-aged men fairly commonly are taking stock of where they are in life and comparing themselves to where their fathers were … a perception that they have significantly dropped down the SES ladder with little hope of climbing farther up in the future is pretty hard to swallow. We men do not only compete with each other, deep underneath we are competing with our dads too. And for many losing that competition badly.
Still I wonder if this is so much a White/Black divide as a Rural/Urban one with race mostly being a marker for that.
More about suicide … specifically note that the highest rates are in rural states, the lowest in heavily urban states, and by firearms (which are disproportionately owned by White rural males).
The middle aged cohort also contains lots of veterans.
TL;DNR?
Rural America is in deep shit. White males in particular there are more commonly angry and despairing and they have both increased access to cheap drugs (meth and heroin) and easy access to effective means to end it while little access and little eagerness to utilize the mental health resources that might possibly help. It is a long term trend, not new, more from the 70s on, but increasing for a variety of reasons.
Here’s data by for all 50 states and D.C., for midlife white mortality rates 1999-2013:
On a side note, you can use the site CDC Wonder to find and document the changes in mortality rates (for midlife whites, ofc) for rural, suburban, and urban areas, instead of speculating.
Okay. Played with CDC Wonder a bit. Thanks for the link.
1999 per 100K suicide rates for White 45 to 54 years old using the closest available urbanization score ranged from a low of 20.8 in large metro fringe to 27.7 small metro. Large metro was 26.9 and non-metro was 25.1.
2013 using closest available urbanization score had large metro increasing by 40% to 37.4 and non-metro increasing by 72% (!) to 43.2.
Fringe large metro had virtually no change.
The transition from medium metro to small metro seemed to be the tipping point with small metro, already at the top, increasing by 64% and keeping its lead at 45.0.
Unable to control by education level in that tool and too few reported rural Black suicides to make trend comparisons.
So indeed much bigger increase in suicides among White 45 to 54 yo males in rural districts than large metro and virtually no increase in fringe large metro. But without being able to control for education level not sure it provides more solid evidence to my hypothesis as it could merely be a result of the college educated being highest in fringe, less in large metro, and least in rural to small metro.
That said it is definitely true that on a per 100K basis many more middle aged White males are killing themselves in small metro to rural than are in medium metro, large metro and large metro fringe (with the latter the lowest by far currently).
South Africa is certainly socially and politically more equitable than in 1994, but not a whole lot more economically equitable, at least for Black people. The white-Black income gap is only a bit smaller than it used to be. (The white vs. Indian gap is much smaller though: Indians have been the big winners since 1994).
You could replace Japan and Asian with American and rural really have the same article pretty much apply.
Hard to place it on loss of White privilege. From I can read it seems to be a very common theme in many countries. I wonder if the question be better asked as to what seems to relatively protect self-identified Latino and Black American middle aged males from the rise.
I think that’s largely a function of our winner-take-all society. If you have the education, ability and motivation to endure a “big city” job (finance, high tech, business, etc) you tend to do ok. But it seems to me there are fewer and fewer “middle class” jobs. Forget manufacturing and heavy industry. When I visit these big office parks in the middle of the country, they all seem like they are consolidating roles and creating “centers of excellence” outside of big cities. That typically means your mid-level office job is either being eliminated or sent somewhere else.
And even people who have those high paying “city jobs” (like me) don’t have it particularly easy. We have to live in very expensive parts of the country, those jobs often are high stress with lots of travel and little to indicate whether you are doing a “good job” outside of the whim of your boss (who you may see once a month).
Well, there is, perhaps, in the upper class, the really-big-money families and the old-money Social-Register-material families. But working-class and middle-class and upper-middle class whites really cannot identify themselves with anything like a “house” or “clan” or “dynasty,” and “family” alone is apparently not good enough.